A simple premise is that an excellent product can help people improve efficiency and even productivity, and people are happy to use the product in their lives; and the product can also achieve commercial success, and the product designer correspondingly gains money or a sense of accomplishment.
In order to design a good product that is popular with users, it is necessary to deeply understand users and assist them in fulfilling their target needs.
Chapters 1 and 2 of this article can answer the most important questions in product design: what are the real needs of users, and how can they be met? The third chapter uses the "character modeling" tool to efficiently and accurately locate the user's target.
1. Identify user goals and discover core needs
We often ask ourselves, what are the user needs? What pain points do users have?
In fact, the essence of user needs is user goals, that is, “what kind of results do users want to get”. In user goal-oriented product design, the fewer processes, the better, and helping users get the results they want is the first priority.
User goals often differ from our guesses. We may think that the optimization plan for the back office is to solve the problem of inefficient operation, but in fact, efficient operation is the boss's goal.
The purpose of the operation itself may be complex, such as "reduce repetitive operations and spend more time fishing", or "give attention to the most worthwhile things, and take the rest away", or "I want to show the comparison of manual operations here. Algorithmic Superiority" and so on. This information is not even the operation itself aware of.
The complexity of product design requirements lies in the complexity of human nature, and the results of human thinking are determined by many factors.
If you only meet a specific need for the phone number list operational surface, such as "autofill here instead of manual input". Failed to touch the essence of the requirement "the information here is highly repetitive and unimportant". But it can't touch the target result of operation "I don't want to do any operation here" and the target result of user "The information here is of no use to me".
You will be caught in the rush of life, always phone number list meeting the needs of the piecemeal, but always unable to meet the real goals of the other party.
If you only focus on what the user expresses what he wants now, but not on the user's ultimate goal. In this way, products built by relying on scattered needs are often bloated and complicated. It seems to meet all the needs of users, but it still cannot solve the user's goals. In the end, it becomes a stack of technical parts, with eight legs and six hands, but still unable to stand and hold it. A robot that picks up items.
1. Recognize the relationship between goals and tasks
As mentioned above, it is taboo to one-sidedly address user demands in product design, which can easily lead to demand stacking and waste productivity.
The demand expressed by the user is often just a small task. The user's goal result is not equal to the user's current task. The goal is the expectation of the final result, while the user's current task is only a step or a set of continuous steps to achieve the goal.
For example: When we give our child a homework assignment:
Child's target result: complete all assignments;
Tasks for children: Chinese homework tasks, math homework tasks and English homework tasks;
Child's action: sitting at the desk and doing homework;
Specific operations for children: write 30 English words, calculate 30 addition problems, and copy 3 ancient poems.
At this time, the child said to you, "Mom, I can't finish my Chinese homework, can you help me with it?" As a parent, what needs do you want to meet your child's needs?
The pain points highlighted by users are the specific tasks after the goals are decomposed
The child's goal is to complete the homework. At this time, he is faced with the problem that the language homework cannot be completed (task a has not been achieved).
If you help him finish his language homework (solve tasks), or help him find ancient poems with fewer words to transcribe (improve specific operations), it will only solve the current problem and not directly solve the target result he wants to get. The next day the child It is very likely that he will not be able to finish his math homework (task b has not been completed), should he continue to help him solve task b?
What we need to do is to find out the reasons that cause children to not complete all the homework (target result) from various factors, whether it is too much homework (target factor), or too little time (space-time factor), or whether the child is playful or suffers during the journey. Interference (action factor)?
Only by solving the "cause" that affects the target results can we really think about ways to help achieve the user's goals and avoid ineffective stacking.
2. Inverse the solution from the target result
There are many product design processes from 0 to 1, but I prefer to call this process "from 1 to 0", that is, the task is deduced from the user's target results. Or more creatively address user goals.
When doing product design, it relies too much on existing technical capabilities and proposes a product design scheme that bypasses technical constraints. It will never break through technical constraints and fall into the trap of inefficient cycle.
Looking at problems through user goals, new technologies can be used to eliminate irrelevant tasks and accomplish user goals more effectively.
For example: In the past, building a set of content platform products required two parts: the content display frontend and the content operation backend. The operation was performed in the backend review-management-recommended content to the frontend.
After the birth of "algorithmic recommendation flow", the content operation background has become tasteless, and the mode of intelligent review + algorithm recommendation completely replaces the manual operation background; the algorithm that accurately hits the user's preferences can help the user to find his favorite. content, and continue to refine its understanding of users like an operation that never gets tired.